


teeth

by ruruka



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-23
Updated: 2020-03-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:20:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23271607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruruka/pseuds/ruruka
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	teeth

In the summer, when it’s hot, the window sticks in its old attic wood frame, but Jounouchi can always hit it in just the right spot to throw it open and cast the wind inside.

In the winter, when it’s cold, Anzu is the first to always mention it when the boys start to wear their uniform jackets again, even if he never chose to stop.

In springtime, it’s...temperate, and for the first time all year the perfect amount of sun for Honda to kick his bike into gear again and rev it euphorically through the defrosted Domino streets.

Now it’s autumn and it’s wet. Dark most days, earlier than ever else. It’ll be warm one morning and cold the next. Autumn can’t yet decide itself.

The slanted loft windows and their stubborn wood frames sit to the left, just to the left, a touch off where the bed is worn beneath his perch on it, feet to the floor and hands hanging between the knees. He’s all those parts. Knees and feet and legs that feel themselves cramped in their castings. His very bones sometimes feel they should split out the skin if only to _breathe._ Perhaps he was taller in another world. In this one, he settles for bulletproof posture to accommodate the lost centimeters.

But not now. Now he only sits. 

There’s nothing as uncomfortable about it as he feels. Those windows and their rain outside. The blanket below him he hasn’t known long enough to care for, but it’s soft the times he’s touched it, vaguely orange, soft, forgiving. Though he can’t be certain he’s even touching it, or if he is, which he thinks he is, that the affection isn’t manufactured alongside all else he’s been taught. He knows lots of things he doesn’t think he knew before. He knows how to play cards and dial a phone, knows names to attach to every face he’s yet to see, knows how to read kana and kanji, knows where to find the best burgers in the city even if he’s never eaten meat. But sometimes he forgets things still. Sometimes he’ll look in the mirror and let his face relax, run fingers through his hair, slouch a bit forward, and the person who looks back is a close duplicate, but the eyes are too large and the nose too small, feelings too funny as they stumble over themselves through this mouth that he’s only borrowing. 

People call him _Yuugi_ now. ...It’s good enough. Even if he thinks he’d been something else last time he fell asleep. It’s good enough for now. 

He sits on the bed in this room he’s a trespasser in, but whoever’s room it is has a mother that invites him to dinner without batting an eye, has a grandfather who looks at him just a bit too long when he thinks he’s inconspicuous, has friends who pat his back and compliment a burst of confidence he’ll put on every so often. “That’s my Yuugi,” Jounouchi had once said, the aftermath to fire up his throat aimed for a tall faced nobody who’d cut them in a line, and they were right there at the very front when Jounouchi tapped an elbow to his arm, told him, “I always knew you had it in ya.”

Without comparison, he doesn’t know how Anzu treated him before, but now she’s almost...careful in the way she moves, and sometimes she wears too much perfume and sometimes not, but he recognizes either way the added thump to his chest he hadn’t whatsoever beckoned whenever she should approach. 

Honda asked him once what kind of soda he’d like from the machine, and his mouth said _lemon_ without consulting first the little notch of his mind that thinks it would’ve liked grape. But lemon is good enough. For now.

Nothing quite pieces together in that sort of sense, the sort of kind of way where he might be floating sometimes or might have his ears stuffed with cotton and none of it would matter, he’d still be Yuugi, he’d still be who he was chosen to be in this life with the weight of memories hanging from a rope around one shared neck. 

On his bed he sits, windows to the left, rainy autumn outside, lifts one hand through the darkened air just to look at it, severe eyes a calmed violet in the lowlight, staring, examining. These hands are delicate. His arms are thinner and his chest is fuller than he ever thought they all should’ve been. Delicate hands. Rounded out nails.

A fingerprint that couldn’t frame him fits to the bottom edge of his teeth. They’re sharp and thin, and just one of them’s crooked in a charming little way, and he goes back farther, deeper, just to inspect, to map out the ridges of molars all the way to their end. It begins to feel odd, with their odd corrugations of sugar lust and odd wet feel, the more he touches, the more he runs his finger round them in a U, a U, a U, a U, falls bored enough to poke his top incisors, the gumline, all the goods he’s seen in flexing his lips round awkwardly in the reflection like before; not his own, not anyone else’s.

He’ll fit into this mold sometime. 

Yuugi would like to know, when he’s blinking in the next few moments, what’s left his finger so wet, but he wipes it on the blanket beside him and thinks he ought to move on with his day like he’d set out to a half hour ago already. Sometimes he can _really_ lose track of time.


End file.
